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Thursday, 8 November 2012

There will be a lot
of analysis as to why Mitt Romney despite the supposed odds that had become
political Shibboleth for the past 18 months lost the US presidential elections.

The mantra that
combined jobs, healthcare, taxes, socialism, misogyny, homophobia, immigration
and racism into a compelling conservative narrative was so shrill the world
literally stopped to see what will happen as the 7th of November
2012 dawned on us.

I just wanted the
whole thing to be over long ago as I watched cherry-pickers of Mitt Romney’s
vaunted business qualities wilfully ignore the realities and the truth of what a
Romney presidency would bring to the world.

Scary, it was

There might just be
a third of a billion Americans but whoever becomes the president is literally
de facto leader of the world, his ideas, opinions, utterances, actions and much
else can determine the global outlook of the world in such unintended ways, it
is scary.

The day after
George W. Bush was elected by reason of that Supreme Court judgement, I said to
my friends, this man will take us to war, I just did not know who with. If I
had a blog then, it would have been documented, but there we are.

A businessman who
became governor whose father was still alive that there would have been reason
for him to come out of the shadow of his father, it does not to take much to
realise something radical will happen.

Disaster!

The trigger was the
Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Centre and the course of world history was
changed forever, two wars, economic policies that lowered taxes and cheapened
access to money – the whole edifice of false hopes collapsed ruinously as he
was seeing off the last few months of his 8-year rule and the world has in no
way recovered from the crisis as we close the fifth year of economic turmoil.

We all know that
the lower taxes idea does not really create jobs nor grow the economy, not in
the Reagan times nor in the Bush II times and this was the crux of Romney’s
grand economic recovery scheme, but I am no economist just an observer of the
realities as the world suffered them.

False dawns

Romney as a Bain
Capital executive in the clearest truth did create wealth but never created
jobs, he was at best a corporate raider who both well, piled on debt and sold
it off to other mugs who thought the fat organisation had been made so lean and
efficient but at what real cost to every single component of the business;
especially the people and the communities?

However, the irony
of this presidential escapade is in the kind of money that was sunk into the
campaigns to the point that it was looking like a black hole casino that would
no doubt have fattened the organisations that pushed the advertisements of terminological
inexactitudes – to be blunt, lies to an electorate that probably just got fed
up with it all as fact checkers worked overtime trying to keep up with the next
rotten untruth, half-truth, bending of the truth or complete absence of the truth
– it almost made the Devil feel outwitted at his game.

I should expect the
networks that ran the advertisements to declare eye-watering profits and walk
away with vulgar bonuses, this was a bumper year that they will be looking to
make this a formula for each election cycle an assured source of atrocious
income.

Run a company like this

Again, let us look
at the presumably amazing business machinery that Mitt Romney brought into his
campaign for the US Presidency.

If this were a
company, it would be a case of the CEO being known to have a clear vision,
mission and set of values for the company that changed with the sentiment of
the market that none of the company shareholders could determine what purpose
the company was for.

Each time, it
seemed there was the promise of great returns and shareholders ploughed even
more of their money into the company just as others saw that the products were
going to a niche market and alarm bells were ringing questioning the viability
of the enterprise.

Bust!

Where there should
have been clear indicators of profit warnings, the investors were so locked
into what had become a Ponzi scheme; they could not cut their losses and run.

For all that was
invested, made, sold and accounted for, at well over $1 billion and management
experience that made the niche market swoon at the genius of the Chief
Executive, the company went bust.

Yes, for all the
acumen that Mitt Romney brought to this business, he failed to get a sustainable
market for his product, one that did not have enduring quality but was
constantly recalled because of flaws and what we might uncharitably refer to as
flip-flops.

Alas! No fault

The honest truth
was that Mitt Romney was not able, not ready and not reliable enough to take
the reins of America and consequently the world in leadership, direction and
purpose – if anything, that was the economic solution for America that Mitt
Romney had; truncated before it compounded the liabilities we are still
contending with.

Sadly, because the
quest for office was not like running a company, Mitt Romney rather than be
charged with false accounting and running the company to ruin with all investors
losing their money, he will return to the comparative comfort of being another
footnote in history that will only come up when parallels are required for
healthcare reform, hosting the Olympics or running the most expensive campaign that
came to naught.

The best outcome

Without doubt from
where I could observe things from, Mitt Romney had no business trying to be
president and I am so glad that after the campaign revealed the character and
substance of the man, not enough Americans were persuaded to hand him
the keys to the White House – even though someone suggested a tweet I posted
was the dumbest he had read with regards to that election night – whether prescience
or just foreboding, I think wars are ending and the prospect of engaging Iran
in a war might well have been kicked out of touch.

We need a world of
accommodations on the pain of everything within our means, Mitt Romney never
showed the foreign policy nous that would have kept the uneasy peace and détente
and for that too I am glad that those who could decide stuck with what they
already knew with the hope that change for the better is still possible.